2022, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 11-21.

“What’s Going on Here?” Reflections on Brian Street’s Contribution to

Literacy Education
Anna Robinson-Pant
University of East Anglia

Abstract
As a teacher and researcher of literacy, Brian Street introduced ethnographic inquiry to two quite different
communities: adult literacy practitioners in India, Ethiopia and Uganda, and university students in the UK and
USA. Through re-visiting his teaching materials and approaches, the article explores how he mediated key
concepts within anthropology – such as ‘context’ and an ‘ethnographic frame of mind’ – through practical
activities with university students and adult educators. Within higher education, Street’s research on academic
literacies both emerged from and built on engagement with students and colleagues around the notion of literacy
as a social practice shaped by institutional hierarchies and cultures. In development projects, Street extended his
early (1984) research in Iran on multiple literacies, including what he termed UNESCO “essay-text literacy”, into
a hands-on programme for literacy trainers to investigate everyday literacies often overlooked by formal adult
literacy initiatives. Street’s active engagement in literacy teaching and learning resulted in methodological
innovation, particularly the development of ‘ethnographic style’ methods. Arguing that applied anthropology was
often seen as having a one-directional relationship with education, Street demonstrated that education could also
make an intellectual contribution to anthropology in terms of deepening understanding of literacy, language and
learning within the discipline.

Keywords: ethnographic style, anthropology, literacy, academic literacies, international development

Introduction

Anyone who was taught by Brian will chuckle at the memories evoked by this phrase – perhaps recalling an in-
depth discussion of an extract from their fieldnotes that they had carelessly pasted into a draft thesis chapter. Or
a shared journey in a taxi when Brian would try to engage the driver in a conversation about how he worked out
his routes and fares. “What’s going on here?” was an invitation to stand back from the obvious, the immediate
action and adopt an ethnographer’s stance – to observe action from the outside, or “in inverted commas”, as a
former student recalls him saying (Coffey 2013). Writing this piece has coincided with the shift to blended
working in my university – and in practical terms, having to clear out twenty-plus years of paper from my office
room. The heaps of files revealed drafts of my PhD thesis, with Brian’s inimitable handwritten comments, his
course reading lists from Sussex and King’s, numerous articles in various stages that he had shared (in the days
before e-circulation) and reports on literacy projects that we worked on together, plus several failed research
funding proposals. Feeling daunted by the challenge of capturing Brian’s wide-ranging contribution to literacy
education – not to mention the task of sorting out my archives - I suddenly realised that I had some valuable
material. Here was the ‘data’ that I was seeking to make sense of, offering insights into Brian’s contribution as a
teacher and researcher of literacy.

This article is an attempt to take up Brian’s question “what is the data telling us?” and to reflect on “what’s going
on here?” through re-visiting his teaching materials and approaches to introducing adult literacy practitioners and
education students to ethnographic inquiry. I have chosen two “telling cases”1 (Mitchell 1984) to explore how he
introduced ideas about literacy from an anthropological perspective to two very different communities. The first
case study is about doctoral teaching through exploring his role as supervisor in UK and US universities, and the
second focuses on his work with adult literacy policy makers and trainers in the Global South. As a PhD student
who entered academia after a career in international development, I have also worked within both domains –

1
Brian often drew on Mitchell’s distinction between a “telling” and a “typical” case to introduce ideas to students and
practitioners about how to theorise from ethnographic findings – see his chapter in Roberts et al (2001: 96-97) and accounts
in the LETTER project which I will discuss later in this article.
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and, in Brian’s words (in the foreword to my published thesis), “represent that new breed of ‘practical
epistemologist”’ (Street, 2001: vii)2.

Looking back at Brian’s writing, I realise that many of his beliefs and values were ahead of his time – the
“practical epistemologists on the cusp of theory and practice” (unpublished paper) have in some ways become
central in today’s UK university discourses around ‘research impact’. Similarly, his argument for the need to look
at what anthropology can offer to education – and the starting point that “anthropology doesn’t “own” the word
“ethnography”’ (Street, 2004: 1) now needs to be historically situated and understood as during a time when the
discipline appeared under threat3. Street challenged this defensive or inward-looking stance in his editorial to the
Special Issue of Anthropology Today on Anthropology and Education, “Anthropologists in the UK have done very
little to engage professional educationalists and their theories systematically” (ibid). Significantly, he emphasised
that the links between the disciplines should be “symbiotic rather than one directional”, asking “what have
anthropologists learned and what can they yet learn, from educationalists?” (ibid). This article sets out to
understand how Brian facilitated this “symbiotic” process of learning – in university classrooms and
development projects - and reflect on the implications for today.

Becoming a Literacy Ethnographer: the Academic Domain

I started a PhD in Education at the University of Sussex in the mid-1990s, having previously worked as a trainer
with literacy facilitators and teachers in Nepal and then moved into planning and policy roles with various
international NGOs. I first encountered Brian through reading his book Literacy in Theory and Practice (Street,
1984) and realised a PhD under his supervision would be an exciting opportunity to develop a new lens on my
professional work. Although I could not join the Anthropology Department where he taught (since I did not
have the required undergraduate degree in anthropology), he suggested that I base myself in the School of
Education and he could supervise me from there. I now see that at a broader level, this was also a practical step
forward in relation to Brian’s argument “for a more symbiotic relationship between the fields” [of education and
anthropology] (Street 2004: 1).

In those first few months, my anthropological training began in earnest – firstly through joining Brian’s Masters
and undergraduate classes where I gained hands-on experience of conducting participant observation in the
university nursery as part of the linguistic ethnography module. Looking back at his reading lists for the MA
Anthropology and Literacy course, the first part focused on “theories of communication and ideology as they
underlie different conceptions and descriptions of literacy”4. Approaches to literacy were analysed from the
different disciplines of Psychology, Linguistics and History, “relating them to anthropological theories regarding
political and ideological processes as well as to specific ethnography”. In the second part of the course, students
were introduced to “the politics of literacy and development”. This is where they/we learned to apply theories to
practice and recognise ideological assumptions, as Brian’s introduction to the reading list explained:

Current Unesco and national government Literacy Programmes and Campaigns make use of the theories we have
been examining, though often implicitly. The first task is to attempt to make the underlying theories explicit so
they can be tested and analysed. We need to be particularly conscious of the socio-economic structures and the
political and ideological interests from which the programmes and official statements about them arise and which
affect the uses to which they are put.

This idea of hidden or implicit theories and making these visible was central to Brian’s work with literacy policy
makers too.

I had come into academia steeped in development policy discourses – not least the common assumption of a
“great divide” (Goody 1968) between literacy and illiteracy. To my surprise, Brian insisted to me that “everyone
holds theories of literacy”, not only academics! Through a series of tasks that he set me each supervision
meeting, I gradually began to uncover the theories of literacy that had informed my own role as a practitioner
and policy maker. He suggested that I bring a text from the NGO where I had been working and write about it

2 See also Street’s later discussions drawing on Barnett and Griffin’s (1997) concept of the “practical epistemologist”: “the
role of the researcher is to be that of a ‘practical epistemologist’, involving critical engagement in real world projects and
action, doing ‘participatory’ work” (Robinson-Pant and Street, 2012: 77).
3 In the longer first draft of his editorial, Street is even stronger on this point, citing Peacock’s (1997) challenge to fellow

anthropologists in the USA not to “risk extinction”.

4 Full references for quotations like this from unpublished reading lists or drafts are not included in the reference list.

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by applying ideas from the anthropological literature that I was reading. It was a funding proposal for an action
research project on literacy and I began to unpeel the layers of the onion, writing about the assumptions that I
now identified as problematic. For instance, I wrote:

…there is no mention of the literacies that already exist in the local context before the literacy programme is
implemented. Literacy is seen as necessary for women to take part in ‘development’…the underlying ideology of
the literacy programme is that women should form groups, get out of the home and send their children to school!
The terminology of Freire and ‘literacy for empowerment’ hides the very functional objectives of the literacy
course.

Ironically, only a few months beforehand, I had been writing similar proposals and reports for this NGO – but I
was now beginning to adopt an outsider perspective on their practices. Brian’s handwritten comments on my
drafts (no track-change in those days!) encouraged me to be reflexive, asking “on whose terms?” when I talked
about “the project’s appropriateness”. Later, on my fieldnotes sent (by post!) from Nepal, he commented “what
were your pedagogical assumptions?” or “why are you judging their teaching?” when I was writing about
programmes and classroom situations with my former ‘teacher’ or ‘policy maker’ hat on. He also gently
introduced new layers of analysis to me through his comments. Next to my frequent references to ‘language’ in
my fieldnotes, he wrote: “you need a language of descriptors here – language/dialect/register/script”.

Whilst I was starting my PhD, Brian was also moving into a new area of research – academic literacies. He was
conducting a large research project at the university, interviewing students and lecturers about their
understanding and reading of specific feedback on essays. Alongside the formal project, Brian began to
investigate his own assumptions and academic literacy practices and as part of this reflexive process, he wrote a
paper which he explained was “to make explicit my own conception of ‘academic literacy’ as an anthropology
lecturer”. The paper included a passage from a book by Godfrey Lienhardt5 called Social Anthropology, which
Brian used with students applying to do anthropology to “give them an idea of the kinds of things we are trying
to do in seminars”6. He explained how the students learned to connect the abstract ideas and the institution of
‘potlatch’ described by Lienhardt7 with their own experiences of giving Christmas cards. The paper also analysed
the “distancing strategies”, how the author “hid behind the text”, and noted:

Lienhardt’s text involves a number of ‘voices’… such mingling of texts and voices is a key part of how we
communicate in both oral and written mode and university should be a prime site for the elaboration of such skills.
However, students have argued that this process mostly remains hidden… in the absence of explicitness, variety
becomes a problem rather than a resource.

This recognition that relationships of power and inequality shaped the interaction between students and
academics was central to Brian’s determination not only to document practices, but also to initiate change in the
Academy.

Brian shared this writing-in-progress at a seminar with anthropology PhD students and explained that his paper
was deliberately not finished so that we could contribute too. I must admit that I was puzzled by this invitation –
although I had welcomed the opportunity to critique development discourses, I still regarded ethnography (and
literacy) as ‘out there’ in development organisations like UNESCO, rather than closer to home in the university.
As a novice academic, I did not feel sufficiently confident to write a section of the paper but welcomed Brian’s
attempts to make these hidden power relationships explicit and to democratise knowledge. The circulated paper

5 Godfrey Lienhardt was an important mentor for Brian, dating from when he taught him at the Institute of Social
Anthropology in Oxford.
6 The quotations here are from the early drafts of the paper that was later published as a chapter in this book: Street, Brian

V. (1999) Academic Literacies, in C. Jones; Brian V. Street (eds.). Students Writing in the University: Cultural and epistemological
issues. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 193–227. The drafts are quite different from
the published version (notably the title which was ‘Academic Literacy: a case study’). So I have chosen to quote here from
the drafts instead, as this is a historical account of the development of Street’s ideas around academic literacies (note plural
rather than singular in the published title).
7 In the extract from Lienhardt’s book that is attached to the ‘academy literacy’ paper, ‘potlatch’ is described as follows:

“One of the most familiar anthropological examples of the non-economical use of wealth as to be found among the Indians
of the coasts of British Colombia in an institution called potlatch. These Indians, immensely rich by the standards of even the
wealthiest subsistence economies, had a most elaborate system of rank and status. This was largely maintained by display
and competition in gargantuan feasting and entertainments, where from time to time persons of distinction would potlatch –
that is, give away or even destroy vast quantities of their possessions.” (Lienhardt, 1964: 79).
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later included sections by some more experienced colleagues, responding and commenting on his analysis –
including Mary Lea8 who questioned how many students would “feel confident to use personal anecdotes” like
Brian did. Howes suggested that “there are different academic literacies for different academic audiences” –
challenging the title of Brian’s paper which was originally ‘Academic Literacy’ (singular). Brian later developed a
more ‘hands-on’ approach to teaching academic literacies through workshops at the University of Pennsylvania
which resulted in his (2009) “hidden features” paper – where students circulated their writing on laptops for
peers to analyse features such as voice, stance, signalling and structure. At a celebration of Brian’s role as a
doctoral supervisor in 2013, many of his former students recalled his advice and detailed feedback on their
academic writing – particularly suggestions to “take the reader by the hand and guide them through the text”
(Costley 2013) and that “a thesis should not be like a detective story, delaying the moment of discovery to the
end” (Moss 2013). What we also remembered is how attentively Brian listened to us and read our work, “his
absolute interest in seeing what you saw and following your logic, rather than imposing his own” (ibid).

As a literacy scholar, Brian greatly enjoyed this kind of active written and oral interaction around texts,
particularly in order to challenge and discover his own assumptions and biases. He encouraged his students to
explore how texts spoke to (or against) each other, and his course reading lists reflected this too. He shared with
us an article he had recently written reviewing three volumes “on the methodological issues raised by
ethnographic research into language and education” (Street, 1993a: 165). His account points to the ways in which
a reading of one text can raise new questions about another, and develops new insights about and ideas for
ethnography through the comparative analysis. He explained:

A ‘reading’ that uses these authors and volumes ‘intertextually’ can, then, enrich our sense of what is involved in
research on reading at a time when many of the old uncertainties have been shaken while at the same time raising
many fruitful areas for further research (ibid: 174).

Brian’s humour (often at his own expense) shines through, making the reader feel they are there in the room
with this distinguished company of researchers:

Reading his [Hammersley’s] text is like taking a cold shower and I find it useful to recall at moments when I am
basking in the warm glow of my favourite platitudes and commitments: a short, sharp shock of the Hammersley
kind can be refreshing as well as unnerving (ibid).

This structured introduction to a community of literacy researchers through their writing was accompanied by
invitations to real life networks, conferences, meetings and of course, social events. The informal learning and
participation in literacy research communities was perhaps the most important, yet ‘hidden’ way in which his
students learned to become literacy ethnographers.

A quick scan of Brian’s reading lists, notes on supervision and feedback on drafts reveals the word ‘power’
repeated again and again. A 1994 seminar paper urged the need for researchers to “pay more attention to
relationships between language, meaning and power in their social contexts”. Brian’s aim as a supervisor was to
introduce his students to ways of making hidden power relations explicit – whether within the Academy or
literacy campaigns in development – observing that “the issues involved are those of epistemology (who controls
knowledge and how; who has the right to give voice) and of identity” (Street, Academic Literacy draft paper).
Many years later, he extended his academic literacies work – including exploring ways to address the geopolitics
of academic writing - beyond the UK and US Academy through collaboration with Dr. Maria Lucia Castanheira
and colleagues at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte in Brazil (see Castanheira et al
2015). What was striking to me as a student was that he not only talked about democratising knowledge, but he
practised it in every aspect of his life.

Learning to be an Ethnographer Outside the University: the Development Domain

Moving to consider Brian’s contribution to literacy education outside the Academy, I will explore my second
case study which focuses on practitioners (teachers, literacy facilitators and trainers) in development projects in
the Global South. Brian had a continuing interest in what ethnography could offer professionals outside
academia and students in disciplines beyond anthropology. The Ealing Ethnography project offers an example of
how an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, educationalists and language specialists worked together to

8Lea was co-researcher on the academic literacies project with Brian Street researching with students and lecturers at the
University of Sussex in the 1990s: see Lea and Street (1998).
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design a programme introducing ethnography to language students on their year abroad 9. An important starting
point for this project was the “distinction between the discipline of anthropology and the ethnography as a
method” (Roberts et al, 2001: 11) and the insistence that the aim was not to turn language students (or their
teachers) into anthropologists. Rather, the emphasis was on learning through ethnography:

the idea is that they can acquire some theoretical concepts and ethnographic skills so that they are able to
understand the local cultural practices sufficiently to write an ethnographic project, rather than undertake a full-
scale ethnography (ibid).

This project could be seen as an early forerunner to innovative professional development projects currently
discussed in this journal – for instance, McDonough’s (2021: 70) article reflects on introducing participant
observation to trainee teachers, observing that “being able to think anthropologically helps teacher candidates
become better teachers”.

As the anthropology specialist on the Ealing project, Brian took the lead in introducing ethnography to the team
and his chapter in their book on ‘Ethnography for Linguists’ presents a succinct account of ‘what is going on’
through the ethnographic experience of the learners. Drawing on three “fundamental concepts: epistemological
relativity, reflexivity and critical consciousness” (Roberts et al, 2001: 93), he analysed how the students on this
programme were introduced to “epistemological levels and not just issues of technique and method” (ibid). For
instance, an incident in a restaurant where a diner leaves money on the table which their friend (rather than the
waiter) later pockets, is used to discuss the idea of epistemological relativity and the culturally relative concepts of
tipping, stealing and friendship. The Ealing project can be seen as condensing the longer term, intensive training
in ethnography offered within university anthropology departments, but it was still situated and shaped by
academic institutional practices (not least, assessment, as the course was run by Thames Valley University).
However, later Brian took the central ideas of taking an ethnographic perspective into the different context of
literacy and development projects (outside formal academic institutions), particularly the concept of an
ethnographic way of thinking. He described how “to develop an ethnographic frame of mind” (ibid: 35) and
emphasised the “need to start looking at their own worlds in an anthropological way” (ibid: 45) – seeing
ethnography as a means of developing curriculum, teaching and learning.

Brian had contributed consultancy advice on literacy to UNESCO and mentoring to individuals working with
NGO projects in the Global South over many years. However, this was often around introducing practitioners
and policy makers to different concepts of literacy (see UNESCO 2003), rather than the kind of ‘hands-on’
ethnographic experience that the team had developed through the Ealing project. By contrast, the LETTER
project (Learning for Empowerment Through Training in Ethnographic Research: enhancing everyday literacies
and numeracies) provided an opportunity to develop ethnographic training for those designing literacy curricula,
through a partnership with adult education specialists: Alan Rogers, Dave Baker (offering mathematics
expertise), Malini Ghose (based with Nirantar in India), Rafat Nabi 10 (based in Pakistan), Alemayehu Gebre (in
Ethiopia) and George Openjuru (Uganda). An article by Street, Rogers and Baker (2006) explains how the idea
for the project emerged from the NGO Nirantar’s work in India and their discussions with women literacy
learners when trainers were surprised to hear rivers described as “animate” (see Nirantar 1997). The NGO
workers realised that they “needed training in how to uncover the existing epistemologies of the women they
worked with” (ibid: 32). Like the Ealing project, LETTER set out to train the participants (in this case, adult
literacy trainers) in ethnographic-style methods, particularly to emphasise the “epistemological dimension of the
ethnographic enterprise”11. The aim was to help them “identify local cultural meanings in context, reflect upon
their own assumptions and values, and then design curriculum and pedagogy that will build on such local
knowledge” (ibid: 33). The authors of the LETTER publications insisted that this approach was not about
“trying to make the adult literacy facilitators into anthropologists, just helping them to make use of ethnographic
perspectives” (Openjuru et al, 2016: 24)

9 The project, co-directed by Celia Roberts and Michael Byram, is written up in detail as a case study in the Roberts et al
(2001) book Language Learners as Ethnographers and the training guidance and complete set of materials are available here:
https://generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk/ethnographicencounters/lara-project-materials/.
10 See Nabi, Rogers and Street (2009) for an account of this research.
11 Castanheira (from informal discussion in 2021) suggests this useful alternative phrase, which brings attention to the idea

“that what was always at stake was the understanding of epistemological concepts” and that this was why “the learning
theory and ways of doing were not disassociated”.
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Using the approach of teachers as ethnographers, the team developed a training programme which combined
academic inputs (on ethnography and adult literacy/learning) and experiential learning. Literacy practitioners
were introduced to ethnographic approaches to collecting information about how communities were engaging
with literacy and numeracy in their everyday lives. This activity was then the basis for developing a critical
perspective on existing literacy programmes, as well as developing new approaches in their own context.
Underpinned by Freirean principles that adults are not “empty vessels”, LETTER – unlike many adult literacy
and development programmes - did not start from the deficit assumption that people are not literate. As the
authors explained in relation to an ethnographic approach to literacy: “Rather, it seeks to discover what literacy
activities there are in any society and how people relate to these activities” (Gebre et al 2009: 14). Like my own
induction as a PhD student into anthropological perspectives on literacy, Brian emphasised the idea of “hidden
literacies” (in the case of the university, this was the taken-for-granted academic literacy values and practices) and
theories, making the invisible visible.

The written accounts of LETTER detail not only the practical tools for collecting information about everyday
literacy practices, but also the importance of learning an ethnographic way of seeing the world, noting: “An
ethnographic stance, once acquired, remains with one for life. Ethnography is a frame of mind, not a special
activity” (ibid: 14). The training encouraged reflexivity, including in the way that participants wrote up their
findings as case studies, advising them to “avoid generalisation and personal judgement. The aim is to state what
actually happened rather than what generally happens” (ibid: 34). What is striking in this context is that the team
did not hold back from introducing ‘theory’ to this non-academic group of participants, stating that the aim of
LETTER was partly to “test the ‘great statements’ we all make about literacy and numeracy” (ibid: 9). The most
important theoretical lens brought to the findings was around power, encouraging participants to look at how
local literacy practices and texts were connected to and shaped by relationships of power in their community.
This meant asking questions around control and ownership of texts through observation of literacy events, as
Openjuru et al (2016) noted in relation to the workshops in Uganda: “A literacy as social practice view looks at
the element of power in the activity – who created the event and the text; who controls it? What does it mean in
this context? Who has the power to name and define it?” (ibid: 12). It is worth noting that facilitating this kind of
critical analysis connects closely with the participatory development movement, which addresses issues around
ownership and voice in international development initiatives.

Analysing the contribution of ethnography to literacy through the LETTER project, a significant element was to
encourage practitioners to look at literacy from outside programmes and institutions and to begin by investigating
social practices around, for instance, religion, markets or agriculture. As the authors explain, their starting point
was “what does our work as teachers of literacy to adults look like if we view ‘literacy’ as social practice? In
particular, we are asking what kinds of literacy are going on in this community, in this culture?” (ibid: 13). The
focus throughout the fieldwork activities was on understanding ‘context’ and exploring/discussing local
meanings and uses of literacy. As I will explain later in this article, ‘context’ here connected with a broader
understanding of ideological frameworks, rather than only the immediately observable situation. Taking this step
outside the literacy classroom – and seeing what was going on – needs to be understood in relation to the
dominance of ‘top-down’ and “schooled literacy” (Street and Street 199512) policy approaches to adult literacy
and learning in most national programmes. Significantly, the LETTER programme worked outside formal
government programmes so raises questions (like other innovative small-scale initiatives) about how it could be
scaled up or embedded in institutional practice. However, the materials and principles developed for training
literacy practitioners in ethnographic methods would be valuable in other practitioner contexts too. Whilst Brian
drew on some of his teaching resources used in the university classroom – notably the turtle and the fish fable13
(familiar to all his students!) to introduce ideas about ethnographers communicating/constructing knowledge
across cultures – he also developed accessible definitions of ethnography and literacy for working with
development practitioners.

Brian took the distinction between ‘ethnographic-style’ and ‘ethnographic’ from Green and Bloome (1997), and
he developed this into a key idea within his work with policy makers and practitioners in development projects.
In Openjuru et al (2016), he explained that “an ethnographic style goes much further than just using some
ethnographic tools. It means adopting an ethnographic perspective, a de-centring, removing power from the
researcher...” (ibid: 23). Recalling his earlier challenge to anthropologists not only to see what is offered to

12 Street’s discussion of the “schooling of literacy” in formal education relates closely to his earlier (1984) discussion of
UNESCO “essay text literacy” in literacy programmes.
13 Read this Buddhist fable on https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/the-fish-and-the-turtle-is-nibbana-nothingness/8517

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education, but also what they can learn from educationalists (Street, 2004), perhaps the answer lies in this
adaptation of ethnography to an applied educational context. Whilst anthropologists may see “ethnographic-
style” as being dumbed down or less rigorous ethnography, Brian was attempting to convey the essence of an
ethnographic approach to those outside anthropology. The “so what?” question which arose in relation to
ethnographic data was as important to Brian as the initial “what’s going on here?” The ethnographic-style
approach developed with literacy practitioners started from the purpose, the ‘so what’ of research, and critically
considered the elements within ethnography that could inform adult learning and curriculum. His contribution to
literacy education within the international development domain was to challenge the more usual assumption
amongst anthropologists that ethnographic research should be conducted first and applied later. Instead, the
context of use/application shaped the ways in which practitioners learned through and conducted ethnography.

Comparing the Two Domains: What is Going on Here?

Looking at these two case studies – of literacy education in the university classroom as compared to
development projects – we can see that Brian had a similar starting point in terms of making implicit theories
explicit, whether this was assumptions around ‘good’ academic writing or the reification of ‘literacy’ in
development policy and schools. By exploring ways of encouraging people to adopt “an ethnographic frame of
mind”, Brian avoided a technicist approach to methods and focused on the process, the purpose of participant
observation being to learn alternative ways of seeing and knowing – or to use his words, understanding other
peoples’ ‘theories’. Unusually in the development context, where ‘research’ tends to mean ‘evaluation’ and
collecting statistics, Brian was keen to extend the practitioners’ “ethnographic frame of mind” beyond the data
collection stage to learn how to analyse, interpret and, most importantly, write up their findings. This is where
‘literacy education’ had a double meaning as literacy trainers were also learning new literacy practices and how to
critically reflect on their writing in relation to the intended audience (the LETTER programme included advice
on how to ‘frame’ their case study so that it would be understood by the reader). Brian drew on Mitchell’s (1984)
notion of the “telling” rather than “typical” case to challenge the more usual tendency to generalise statistically in
development texts.

Collaboration across cultures, disciplines and institutions was integral to Brian’s approach to literacy education in
both domains. In the academic domain, as an anthropologist, he connected across disciplines (particularly
linguistics and education) and university departments to investigate not only how literacy ethnography could
enhance university teaching, but also to deepen understanding into established academic practices. In the
development domain, his close partnerships with adult educators and adult learning specialist, Alan Rogers,
enabled him to learn how to develop stronger synergies between research and pedagogy. In the academic
domain, he was himself a ‘practitioner’ and his ethnographic research (particularly his reflexive approach to
communicative practices and academic writing) directly informed his teaching, In the development domain
however, he recognised that he was at one step removed, and he worked closely with adult educator colleagues
to mediate theoretical and methodological concepts.

Brian’s approach with both students and development actors was not to challenge their assumptions directly (as I
described with my own induction into different ways of looking at literacy and development) but as former PhD
student, Simon Coffey explained, “he gently and patiently nudged my conceptual understanding” (Coffey 2013).
Whilst this worked well for students and possibly literacy practitioners on the ground, I wonder now if it was too
subtle for international policy makers in literacy and development. Brian’s aim of “complicating” how we see the
world and his indirect ways of challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about literacy would not fit easily
within international policy discourses where certainties and direct statements are more welcome. However, as I
continue to work with UNESCO, I have observed that as a teacher Brian succeeded in introducing the concept
of literacy as a social practice and an “ethnographic mindset” to some individual development policy makers,
even if it is not possible for them to reflect this fully in official documents or reports. As Brian often
commented, it is not only about how policy makers write about literacy but about learning to read about literacy
in a different way too. As he pointed out, it is generally accepted that people need to learn how to read
quantitative data, and policy makers may require an introduction to how to read ethnographic research so that
data is not dismissed as ‘anecdotal’. This is another example of how Brian’s work in the literacy development
domain could also contribute to the academic domain, including the teaching of anthropology, where it may be
assumed that ethnographic texts ‘speak’ in a similar way to multiple audiences.

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Re-Evaluating ‘Context’ in Literacy Research and Practice

Brian’s (1984) seminal book Literacy in Theory and Practice, based on his ethnographic research in Iran, argues
strongly against “UNESCO essay text literacy” and the stereotypes of ‘illiterates’ that have informed many
teaching/learning programmes. Challenging the idea that people passively ‘receive’ literacy, Street proposed that
they have their own theories and ideologies which influence how they “take hold” (Kulick and Stroud 1993) of
literacy. Arguing against scholars (Ong 1982, Goody, 1968) who focused on the “consequences” of literacy, he
asserted in his introduction to the book that “the skills and concepts that accompany literacy acquisition … do
not stem in some automatic way from the inherent qualities of literacy… but are aspects of a specific ideology”
(Street, 1984:1). Here he emphasised the need to look at the “broader parameters of context” (ibid: 15) in order
to understand the meanings of literacy.

In his later work, he continued to expand on this idea of context as being not just that which is observable, but
relating to conceptual systems too. In the introduction to Cross-cultural Approaches to Literacy (1993b), he explained
that “central to development of this conceptual apparatus for the study of literacy is a re-evaluation of ‘context’
in linguistic analysis” (p 13). Arguing that within linguistics, ‘context’ has often been taken in a limited sense to
refer to the immediate “context of utterance”, he suggested that there is “little point… unless one knows the
broader social and conceptual framework that gives it meaning” (ibid: 15). This distinction between the
immediate visible context and the broader, more dynamic meaning of ‘context’ as relating to conceptual systems
could be related to the limitations that he identified in his discussion of the notion of ‘literacy event’. He
suggested that this concept was “helpful” for researchers and practitioners who could then focus on a particular
situation that involves reading, writing and/or texts and “begin to draw out its characteristics” (ibid) – and this
was certainly a practical starting point for many of the LETTER activities. However, he warned against the
danger of using literacy event on its own – that “it remains descriptive and – from an anthropological point of
view – it does not tell us how meanings are constructed” (Street 2001b: 11). This is where the concept of ‘literacy
practices’ is needed as he explained: “The concept of literacy practices attempts both to handle the events and the
patterns around literacy and to link them to something broader of a cultural and social kind” (ibid). His
explanation that ‘context’ here was more than the observable (“those models we cannot get at simply by sitting
on a wall with a video” (ibid)) points to the purpose and value of ethnography within literacy studies: “we have
to start talking to people, listening to them and linking their immediate experience out to other things that they
do as well” (ibid).

Taking these ideas about context back to my earlier analysis of the two case studies, what is striking is Brian’s
attempt to shift students’ and literacy practitioners’ attention beyond the immediate observable situation
captured through participant observation – particularly through his questioning “what is going on here?” In
much educational writing on schools and literacy programmes, ‘contextualised’ teaching and learning or
curriculum refers to taking account of a student’s home ‘culture’, rather than engaging with relationships of
inequality and power. In both domains – academia and development policy – Brian was starting from a broader
understanding of ‘context’ as embracing ideologies and “implicit theories”. His writing on literacy campaigns –
the recognition that “literacy is being transferred from a different culture, so that those receiving it will be more
conscious of the nature and power of that culture than of the mere technical aspects of reading and writing”
(Street 1995: 30) – could have equally applied to the university, where he observed a similar gap between
students and lecturers. By rejecting Malinowski’s fixed and static “context of situation” or “Goffman-inspired
‘interactionism’” (Street 1993b: 15), aspects of context that are directly observable, Street proposed that the
important dimension of context was around dynamism and change. The educator’s role was not simply to
recognise and fit in to a certain social context which (like culture, see Street 1993c) is perceived as ‘out there’.
Rather, the attention to ideology through a broader dynamic concept of context is intended to make visible and
transform power inequalities.

Conclusion: Reflections on Brian Street’s Contribution to Literacy Education

E.M. Forster’s “only connect” is often mentioned as summing up Brian’s approach to life – and to literacy. In
the introduction to this article, I mentioned his challenge to anthropology to connect with education, as he
perceived an assumption that the influence should be one-way, rather than facilitating a dialogue between the
disciplines. Certainly, Brian’s contribution to education is evident in the ways in which he introduced
ethnographic approaches to colleagues in the university through his academic literacies work, and to adult
educators in development organisations to encourage them to reflect on their practice and literacy curriculum.
The value to pedagogy of a social practice approach to literacy is now widely recognised and is reflected in
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several recent articles in this journal – for instance, Chattaraj (2020) argues “why anthropologists should teach
writing”, with insights about how participant observation “destabilises the authority of the written text” (ibid:
36). Similarly, the concept of literacy as a social practice and an ideological model of literacy has begun to be
recognised within development policy discourses. However, Brian’s ideas of multiple literacies and a continuum
(rather than a divide) between literacy and orality introduce a complexity which is not easy to accommodate
within literacy assessment regimes and large-scale planning. A similar challenge remains around how to introduce
a broader understanding of ‘context’ into adult literacy and development policy, a field which has tended to
downplay conflicting ideologies. The impact of Brian’s ideas and contributing an “ethnographic frame of mind”
is perhaps more evident at an individual level, amongst those who have learned alongside Brian through
collaborative projects and training programmes like LETTER. This includes many people who have learned how
to ‘read’ ethnographic accounts of literacy.

Brian’s active engagement in literacy teaching and learning – whether in development projects or the university –
has fed back into anthropology as a discipline too. In his Anthropology Today editorial, Brian referred to the
‘applied’ debates and the relationship between education and anthropology as part of “the wider engagement of
anthropology with the public domain” (Street, 2004: 1). In this respect, his literacy work with practitioners
illustrated an approach where action or impact was central, and ethnography was adapted to fit the purpose/aims
of the participants. This resulted in methodological innovation and the development of “ethnographic-style”
research methods. However, Brian also highlighted the potential “intellectual” contribution of education to
anthropology, “especially in terms of our understanding of language and of learning” (ibid). This is perhaps our
challenge now – to build on the conceptual learning about literacy and social change from projects like LETTER
and to see our roles within practitioner and academic domains as closely intertwined. As Street so clearly stated:

Research, then, has a task to do in making visible the complexity of local, everyday, community literacy practices and
challenging dominant stereotypes and myopia. This indeed has become a major drive in my research, teaching and
writing, both in the research community and in the public arena.14.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Maria Lucia Castanheira and Alan Rogers for their insightful comments and suggestions on
the first draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Castanheira, M.L., Street, B.V., Carvalho, G.T. (2015) Navigating across academic contexts: Campo and Angolan
students in a Brazilian university. Pedagogies, 10 (1), 70-85.

Chattaraj, D. (2020) Anthropology and writing pedagogy: why anthropologists should teach writing, Teaching
Anthropology, 9 (1), 35-43.

Coffey, S. (2013) Reflective piece in Mentor, colleague and friend: Celebrating Brian Street, Memories and appreciations from
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content/uploads/2012/12/Ethiopia-whole-book-knj.pdf

14See unpublished paper by Street, ‘Why research multiple literacy practices?’:

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.505.777&rep=rep1&type=pdf
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